The Word Counter Widget is a Dashboard Widget for Macintosh OS X. It provides word counts and character counts and can also count the number of instances of a specified word or phrase. It has several customizable options, including:

Counting all words or only words above a specified length

Counting all characters or all characters without spaces

Counting hyphenated words as a single word or as separate words

Counting text instances in a case-sensitive or case-insensitive manner